Computerized social networks provide a means of interaction among computer users through communities they build over time to share interests, activities, and business connections. Upon joining a social network, a member may create a digital persona, which may be expressed as a profile, where the member's various likes and interests can be listed, such as politics, movies, books, religious affiliations, sports, and professional associations. In one embodiment of a social network, when a member selects a social plugin button on a web page, the social network represented by the social plugin button updates the member's profile and preference history, indicating to other community members that there are topics in the digital content 210 that the member finds interesting. A typical web page may contain one or more social plugins 212, each representing a particular social network provider 205 as an icon. Typical actions represented by a social plugin 212 may include a RSS feed (Rich Site Summary), “follow,” “recommend,” and “like.”
The member's updated data may be broadcast to all members, or only to one or more subsets, based on the member's defined privacy settings. However, there may be topics that the member would prefer not to share with some members in the social community, for example, political discussions. Similarly, the default handling of a member's profile may reveal far more personal information than is desirable for a member's safety and privacy. While social networks typically provide a manual method of dividing members into groups and assigning them various privacy settings, the process places the responsibility of maintaining an appropriate security policy on the member. Further, the process is labor intensive and depends on the member remembering to select an appropriate privacy setting for the digital content 210 before selecting the social plugin button on the web page.
It would therefore be desirable to increase privacy and control of personal data in a social network community by providing an improved method and system for sharing topics in social networking.